A capability building framework is a scalable plan for how an organisation can identify, develop and nurture the capabilities critical to business success. It shapes training and development around improving employee performance through the capabilities most likely to have a business impact.
All good business planning should come with a strategy, not just new business practices. This means there are not only accountabilities but a plan of action for your capability framework. When designing a capability building strategy, you want to have a focus. We recommend narrowing your focus in 2 ways.
- Business Focus: Capability development, while a strategy for L&D, looks to business transformation. It's about changing mindsets, behaviours and processes that drive the momentum of your execution engine. If you don't have guardrails in place to accurately assess capability realisation, you're likely not seeing the effects of a capability's full potential.
- Performance Focus: Take a more traditional look at capability development and focus solely on the individual improvement employees need to make. Think cognitive, behavioural and affective. A mind, body and soul approach breaks capability building activities into more nuanced training.
A capability framework outlines the who, what, where, when and how. This helps sculpt the process for development programs in your organisation, using meaningful data inputs and outputs for employee and business performance.
You want to map a training need to the capability building process. This shapes what mode of training is necessary, how you can evaluate the efficacy of training and what the outcome will be. While a framework might seem basic on the surface, it gives the succinct who, what, where, when and why.
Part of the development stage of capability building is the design of learning interventions. Professional development plans are the crux of development programs for many companies.
- Capability Development Plan: Rather than L&D manually assigning content to a learner that might address a training need, a capability development plan charts content to a capability framework. This makes it easier to tie job roles to learning opportunities, benchmark performance, assess competencies and prove the ROI of training early on.
- Competency Model: The competency model assesses an employee's performance against what performance should look like. Think of it as a measure of progress in capability development. Without guardrails, you can't be sure that impacts will be felt or that the modes of training provided are effective.
As with all things business planning, capability development shouldn't be a one-off affair. There are 3 big reasons you want to cultivate a culture of continuous learning.
- Sustainable high performance: A capability map shows the highest priority capabilities by their impact on changes compared to availability in your workforce. These are your gaps. Capability development initiatives are one way to close the gap between where you are now and where you'd like to be in an ideal future.
- Talent pipeline: Having a continuous supply chain of talent with your unique capabilities is pretty much the key to maintaining a competitive edge over other service providers. You want to be continually developing the organisational capabilities that power this supply and ensuring the right people are poised for succession.
- Employee engagement: Organisational performance hinges on employee performance but employee performance is determined by their capabilities. Building those capabilities hinges on employee engagement. Professional development is proven to increase retention, boost employee satisfaction and establish healthy workplace patterns.
For a more in-depth look at capability building frameworks, have a read of the full article.
